the first word
Julie Savage Parker, Editor

It is not easy to become beautiful. It requires hard work, patience, and attention to detail. It also takes a certain firmness of purpose. BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER, and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye. ~ Miss Piggy

Out of the mouths of "babes"! This month's theme—EYE OF THE BEHOLDER—is a doozy, n'est-ce pas? We can go all kinds of places with this one. What prompted our look at beauty is that "beauty"—the sort of beauty addressed by your average woman's (and girls) magazine—has not and will not appear in the pages of Western North Carolina Woman. The sort of "beauty", that is, that demands we camouflage ourselves to be acceptable in the eyes of others; the sort of beauty that defines our value by wearing the right shoe (not to mention the left one) or the right designer outfit; the sort of "beauty" that drives otherwise reasonable women to spend thousands of dollars and undergo major surgery to erase signs of her age while risking serious, sometimes disfiguring complications, not to mention the prospect of coming out the other end looking like an alien life form. That sort of beauty you will not see on these pages.

"Au contraire", says Miss Piggy (who is, by the way, one of our biggest fans). Au contraire: typically, WNC WOMAN deals with beauty that is deeper-than-skin: the beauty of the spirit, the beauty of our actions, our creations, and our dreams. In this issue, however, we are going to be a bit a-typical. (Being a-typical is what we like best!) We are going turn around and take a look at beauty face to face (pun intended, of course). We'll initiate the conversation in this issue and then invite you to continue it, and we'll print your response (as space allows) in our July issue: "OUR BODIES, OURSELVES".

Then we are going to smack any "stupid or misinformed beholder" we come across . . . Wait a minute . . . Sandi tells moi we can't do that. We are not about smacking, but celebrating, she reminds me. Yeah, Sandi, but . . . can't we just smack a couple of 'em?